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Obama personally oversees “kill list”

The New York Times is reporting President Obama personally oversees a “kill list” containing the names and photos of individuals targeted for assassination in the secret U.S. drone war. According to the Times, Obama signs off on every targeted killing in Yemen and Somalia and the more complex or risky strikes in Pakistan. National Security Adviser Thomas Donilon said, “He is determined that he will make these decisions about how far and wide these operations will go.” Obama is also said to personally approve every addition to the expanding “kill list.” Individuals on the list include U.S. citizens, as well teenage girls as young as 17 years old. The Times quotes former White House Chief of Staff William Daley about Obama’s decision to assassinate Anwar al-Awlaki, a U.S. citizen, in Yemen. According to Daley, Obama called the decision to strike the U.S.-born cleric “an easy one.” Since April, the United States has carried out at least 14 drone strikes in Yemen and six in Pakistan. Over the weekend, a U.S. drone strike in Yemen killed at least five people.

How many more US citizens will Obama assassinate without due process? How many more will he kill because someone related to them said something uncomfortable?

How many more innocents will die in “signature strikes”? Marcy Wheeler of EmptyWheel.net in her recent Democracy Now! interview reminds us that a signature strike “means we’re shooting drones at people whose identity we don’t actually know. We’re shooting at them because they look like terrorists from the sky, because they seem to have certain levels of security. In other words, Brennan was not telling the full truth when he said that these are targeted killings. What they are, in fact, are not targeted. We don’t know who we’re shooting at.”.